19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sunday, August 12, 2018

After the labors for God, in the middle of permanent afflictions, and the dangers it drew out of resistance, the prophet Elias became weary and resigned. Persecuted by the wife of Israeli’ king, Ysabel, due to the killing of her 500 false prophets and to be responsible for spreading the glory of God, Yahweh, Elias is tired and wanted to die. He fell into something we call today a depression. In a moment of the biggest God comes to help him. The angel of the Lord appears in a dream and asks him to eat what God has prepared for him for his 40 day journey to the Horeb’ mountain where Elias will receive the grace of Gods vision. Experts of spiritual life find here some mystical rule: God intervenes especially when man totally relies on God working, what in spirituality is called “spiritual deprivation”. Immersed in God man in his biggest crisis, when he holds on, receives special graces of enlightenment from God who quiets his anxieties and doubts and gives him power to go forward to serve God even with more enthusiasm. Jesus Christ, about whose mission his kinsmen doubted, has to be always in that situation of human fatigue and holy resignation, but because of his divinity he also receives consolation to continue working according to the plan of his Father. He is conscience that the murmuring people do not stop in putting him to death, but this is a way how His mission will be fulfilled and He himself starts to become an answer of his Father, the true bread which gives a life: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day (…). I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that comes down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world”. From the perspective of the Eucharist and the death on the cross we know what Jesus wanted to tell. St. Paul assuming that Christians know the teaching of Jesus Christ admonishes them and us to be faithful to his teaching: “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma”.